


and days gone by

by outwardbound93



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Holiday Fic Exchange, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 09:12:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5369777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outwardbound93/pseuds/outwardbound93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Niall catches himself glancing at Harry in the backseat. The tops of buildings are lined with Christmas lights like the iced piping on a gingerbread house, and the crisp sharp light of a winter night makes Harry’s skin look warm and soft.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and days gone by

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magicalxunicorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicalxunicorn/gifts).



> title from robert burns's poem 'auld lang syne' (you can listen to lord huron sing it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMjMRp9I-uQ/)). written for the prompt, "Niall and Harry are in a cabin while the other boys are out on the town then a storm hits." i hope you like it! merry christmas and happy new year!

Harry twitches the heat up another notch, and Niall gives up entirely. He rolls the window all the way down and hangs his head out the side of the car like a fucking dog. It’s so broilingly hot inside Harry’s rented Prius that he feels like he’s suffocating on the air inside the car, and the hair at his hairline and temples is damp with sweat.

“Hey,” Harry complains, turning the volume down again.

Niall grits his teeth. “Listen, if you let the damn radio alone, I’ll let you kill me with heat stroke, alright?”

“You’re not going to die of heat stroke,” Harry rolls his eyes. He frowns. “I don’t think.”

Harry’s like a fucking robot, with no heat of his own, Niall wants to say. The last remaining decent bit of him reminds him that he really shouldn’t, so he keeps his mouth shut. He’s been putting up with Harry for the past hour and fifteen minutes, and he’s not sure he’s going to last another forty-five minutes. Not when he and Harry can’t agree on the radio station, or the heat setting, or even how far Niall can lean his seat back so that he could play possum and pretend to be asleep to avoid Harry’s droning voice.

Arctic air whips around the inside of the car, ruffling Harry’s curls and drying the sweat on Niall’s face. It’s legitimately Arctic air, a front blowing down from Canada to their very own corner of Pennsylvania and the surrounding region. It’s a sign that the world’s ending, and all that, but what it means for them is that the skiing ought to be excellent.

Not that Niall’s ever been skiing before. Or snowboarding, or even seen snow like they’ve got in this part of America. Surprisingly, the cost of renting a cabin on Montage Mountain with four other co-eds had been less expensive than buying a ticket back to Ireland for the winter holiday. He’d suggested they save all their money and take it to New York for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, but he’d been outvoted, so.

Anyway, it was meant to be fun, an escape from UPenn and all that came with it. Instead, he’s been stuck with Harry fucking Styles, who can’t tell Tom Petty from Don Henley and who insists on keeping the car a toasty ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Niall doesn’t have to do the conversion in his head to know that it’s _hot._

“Can’t we just fucking agree on Christmas tunes? Please?” Niall sighs. He rolls up the window just a bit, because he can actually see Harry’s face getting paler, his nose and ears getting pink. Jesus, the guy has the constitution of a flower.

“I don’t want to,” Harry says. He sniffles pointedly, but Niall just leaves the window halfway up. He’s suffered enough for the sake of this guy.

Harry takes a sip of his gas station cappuccino. It smells good, even though it’s probably made up the kind of coffee grounds that Starbucks can’t legally sell, and Niall glances into the backseat to check on the food.

He and Harry spent an agonizing three hours at a Walmart two days ago buying everyone’s food stock for their week-long ski trip. Liam, who’s taken a camping and backpacking course, organized the menu for them.

They have a small kingdom’s worth of noodles, powdered cheese, dried and salted meat, six boxes of Ritz crackers courtesy of Harry, and eight cases of beer, because Niall’s not going to get through a break with Harry without them. Canned beans and veg, four heaping bags of potatoes, and three cartons of eighteen eggs. Should be enough.

“The others are behind us?” Harry asks, like he hasn’t checked in with Niall every fifteen minutes for the past hour.

“Yes,” Niall says, just like every time before. He glances down at his phone as if checking his messages, even though he’s not texted them to check and make sure just because Harry’s been such an unbearable nag about it. “They’re about half an hour behind,” Niall fibs, “‘cos Perrie’s driving.” _And she doesn’t drive like a maniac,_ Niall kindly refrains from saying. Harry will get them there sooner, which Niall is grateful for, but he might kill them along the way. “So you can slow down, if you want. It’s not a race.”

Harry’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. “I know what I’m doing, Niall. I’m not going to wreck us.”

Niall keeps himself quiet for a solid two minutes before he says, “Well, I’m just checking, because I know we don’t ordinarily need snow chains and all the rest of it, so –”

“I know what I’m doing,” Harry insists, turning the wheel hard into their next turn, so that the rear of the car fishtails a bit. “Just trust me, okay? I’m not as stupid as you seem to think I am.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” Niall says, even though he may have had a moment of severe unkindness the other day and said that exact thing to Louis. He just talks so fucking slow, and none of his stories make any damn sense, it’s maddening to listen to him. It’s like listening to a little kid try to tell a story, but Niall’s not obliged to pretend to like it very much.

Harry doesn’t reply, just drops his hands to his lap and holds the wheel from the bottom. He’s better at driving these mountain roads than Niall thinks he would be, to be honest. He’s driven around the mountains of Ireland in his father’s battered truck enough times to know how achingly slow-going it usually is.

The car lapses into a mostly awkward silence, but at least they seem to have reached some kind of compromise. Niall leaves his window half-rolled down, and Harry leaves the radio station turned too low to hear over the hum of his wheels on the road, and neither of them are totally happy.

Harry decelerates when they turn off I-380N and onto Montage Mountain Road, and Niall takes over navigation from Siri, who he tested last night. He figured out that she doesn’t actually know the roads as well as she thinks she does the time he and Louis went to buy weed and accidentally wound up gatecrashing a wedding. It’d worked out alright in the end, but still.

“Turn left up here,” Niall says, and Harry steers them onto a two-lane highway. “Right,” Niall murmurs, and they turn into the long driveway of Pocono Rentals to pick up their cabin keys. “You’ve got your ID?” Niall asks. Harry nods, patting his bum. He turns the key in the ignition and they step out of Harry’s car into wind so biting that Niall involuntarily takes a sharp breath. Harry looks over at him with a smirk, so Niall grits his teeth and leads the way inside.

The clerk is pretty and helpful and the first decent human being Niall’s seen since he slid into Harry’s car two hours ago.

“You boys be careful now,” she tells Niall and Harry as Harry signs the last of their paperwork. Niall stops digging through the jar of candy on her desk for something other than those fast-melting butter mints. “There’s a storm coming in today, so don’t wander too far from home before the storm hits.”

Harry shoots Niall an anxious look. He slides his phone out of his pocket and finally shoots Louis a real text, asking _where r u?_   

 _well_ Louis sends back, so Niall rings him up once he and Harry are sat back inside Harry’s car. Harry’s arm flails out and he knocks Niall in the stomach so that Niall will buckle up even though the fucking car isn’t even moving. Niall rolls his eyes. He’s fumbling with the buckle when Louis picks up his phone.

“Where are you?” Niall asks.

“Well,” Louis says again, and Niall opens his mouth to say something – probably not something very nice – and Harry plucks the phone out of his hand.

“Please tell us you’ve left, at least,” Harry says. He reaches over and finishes doing up Niall’s buckle for him, and Niall jabs at his phone screen until Louis’s voice comes blaring out at the both of them over speaker.

Louis says, “Not technically, no,” and Niall and Harry both groan, slumping down in their seats. “Sorry, lads,” and at least he sounds genuinely repentant. “Just don’t kill each other for the next few hours and we’ll be right there.”

“Please hurry,” Niall gets in before Harry hangs up.

Harry twists the keys in the ignition, and Niall very mindfully doesn’t aim the heating vents at himself, even if he’s about to lose two fingers to frostbite. “At least we get first pick of rooms,” Harry says.

“Till the others get here,” Niall points out. Liam and Louis and Zayn and Perrie. He’d not have come because who wants to be the only single one amongst a bunch of couples except that Louis had promised him that he was bringing a kid from his English Comp class, and that he and Niall would get on like cheese and crackers.

Harry fiddles with the knob of the radio. Niall’s sure he just makes the station more staticky than it was before. “Yeah,” he just murmurs. They don’t talk much on the ride up into the mountains, where the cabin is. It’s close enough to Roamingwood Lake that Niall can pick out the very tops of a handful of sailboats moored to the dock. It’s nothing like the rocky coast of Ireland, where waves violently punch the cliffs and the wind is so sharp and salty that it feels a bit like having a nasal irrigation to visit the shoreline.

The house doesn’t have a garage, so Harry parks the car on the street in front of the house. He’s brought two large travel bags, and he’s struggling to keep both of them on his shoulders while Niall leads the way up the drive. “Key?” he asks, and Harry presses it into his palm.

The door swings open, and Niall lets out a low whistle. “Nice,” he murmurs, stepping into the main room. There’s a kitchen off to the side, and a staircase in the corner leads up to an open loft.

“Reminds me of my step-dad’s cabin,” Harry says, which is just enough of a subtle brag that Niall rolls his eyes and goes to pick out his room. Maybe he’ll stake it out and hold onto it even when the others get here. Let them squeeze onto a couch together while he stretches out across a queen-size mattress. He picks the nearest bedroom, figuring they’re both the same, and listens to Harry do the same.

Niall wonders whether he ought to tell Harry he’s taking a nap, and then he just shrugs. Harry probably won’t care. So Niall burrows under his blankets and pulls the pillow over his head, and he’s asleep within minutes.

“Niall,” someone murmurs, their hand on his shoulder. “Niall.” Niall sits bolt upright in bed, his heart pounding a mile a minute. His mind scrambles for whatever assignment he’d forgotten to do, which final he’d missed.

The stranger in his room leaps back, stumbling over the cloak draped over his shoulders. Cloak? Blanket. It’s just Harry, looking up at Niall with an almost wounded expression on his face, his hand on the wall for balance. “Do you always wake up like that?”

“Sorry, I thought,” Niall puts one palm over his racing heart. “I thought I’d forgotten something. What – what are you doing in here?”

Biting his lip, Harry says, “Listen.”

So Niall cocks his head, listening hard. The house is quiet, mostly, except for his own labored breathing and the intense way Harry’s looking at him. He’s not making any noise but it feels like he should be, the way his big round eyes are set on Niall. Like the nonexistent sound Niall imagines atoms in cohesion with each other make a sound, only the rest of the universe is too big to hear it.

“‘S quiet,” he says, not understanding.

“Too quiet,” Harry says solemnly, and then he breaks into a smile. His brow wrinkles up and he adds, “It’s snowing.”

Niall pushes his blanket back and throws his legs over the side of the bed, and it hits him all at once, how intense the cold is. “Christ, we’ve got to get the AC going.” Harry nods and shuffles off to kick start the heater, so Niall crosses his arms over his chest and wanders out of his room to the sliding doors that open onto the deck to check the weather. He lets out a long, low whistle. “Shit.”

Harry makes a curious sound. “I’ve just realized,” he says, moving over to the bank of light switches beside the door. He toggles a couple and nothing happens. “We’ve lost power.”

“Shit,” Niall repeats. Then it’s like his brain finally wakes up and he slides his phone out of his pocket to ring Louis. “How soon is the storm meant to last?” he asks Harry, who immediately pulls his phone out to check. “Lou,” Niall says in a rush, but it’s just Louis’s stupid voicemail, _Oi? ‘Ello mate, it’s Louis here!_ drunken laughter, then, _Eh, no it’s not! I’m busy getting laid so ring back when Liam regains his sanity and breaks up with me. Lots of love._

“Lots of love,” Niall grumbles into the receiver. He sounds just like his mother. “Listen, if you get this, be careful, alright? Me and Harry are already at the cabin but it doesn’t seem like you should be out driving in this. Give Perrie my love,” he adds, then rings off.

Harry weighs in, “You should’ve told them to turn around and come home until this clears up.” His eyes are still trained on the phone in his hand.

“That would’ve been helpful to add while I was still on the phone,” Niall points out, trying them again. “What’s the weather report say?”

“It’s not loading,” Harry says, same time as Niall’s phone gives him the dial tone.

Niall looks at it in his palm. It never really registers how utterly useless a cellphone is until the service goes out, and then it just becomes a very expensive paperweight with a calculator on.

Harry stands in the middle of the living room, shivering in his blanket. “Do you think we should try driving back into town?” he asks.

“Probably not, right?” Niall answers. “Do you know how to drive in that?” He gestures outside, where big flat fluffy snowflakes swirl down in rivulets.

“I don’t think we should risk staying,” Harry argues. “We might get snowed in for a fortnight, with the way the weather is around here.”

Niall mutters, “Fucking global warming.” He takes a deep breath. “As long as the water’s running, we should do fine, right?”

“Till the pipes freeze,” Harry adds helpfully. But Niall’s not a fan of getting into a car with Harry, who’s just as likely to drive them into the lake as he is to get them into town safely.

Niall rubs his forehead. “Christ. I can’t believe I’m trapped in a cabin in the middle of the woods with you.” He doesn’t mean to put extra emphasis on “you,” but he must, because Harry stiffens.

“Yeah, well, same,” he sniffs. He tightens the blanket around his shoulders and stomps off to his room. He emerges wearing his boots, his car keys in hand. “Do you want to help me unload the food, or not?”

“I’ll help,” Niall says quickly, pushing his arms through the sleeves of the parka he’d hung up on the hook beside the door. Denise had sent him this coat when he started talking about going on a ski trip “so that he’d look like a proper American,” and even though he’d thought he’d looked like a proper dunce, he’s nothing but appreciative now.

The snow comes down so fast in thick spirals, so that Niall and Harry are almost immediately blinded. Niall follows Harry down the drive to his car, the snow already heaped up to their knees. Harry pops the trunk and Niall reaches blindly in, grabbing for as many bags as he can heave at one time.

Harry does the same, and then, teeth chattering, he says, “Leave the rest for tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Niall agrees. How Harry hears him is a mystery, but they carry the bags inside and heap them up on the counters. Snow follows them inside in tendrils as if the storm swirling overhead is some kind of malevolent jellyfish of precipitation, and Niall has to dig his feet into the laminate tile and shoulder the door closed with all his strength. “Good thing we didn’t try driving,” he says, his teeth chattering.

Harry makes a noise like an exasperated sigh, and then he starts poking through their food stock. “Almost all of this has to be cooked or heated or –” he plonks a can on the counter. “Did we even pack a can opener?”

“Yeah, let me see it,” Niall says, holding his hand out.

Harry clutches the can. “It’s kidney beans, Niall. We’re going to eat them cold?”

“They’re not bad unheated,” Niall says, and then he stops talking abruptly. Harry hands him the can after a moment of hesitation and Niall takes out the pocket knife in his jeans. He flips out the skinny little blade. “The trick,” he says, to cover up the awkward silence, “is to not to be holding the can when you try to stab it through the lid. Almost lost a finger once that way. Here, pass me one of the bowls. The paper one, yeah.”

Niall manages to peel the lid off the can without the beans spewing out all over himself or Harry or the floors or cabinets, and he empties the can into the paper bowl. “If we had any beef jerky, we could toss that in,” he muses. He nudges the first bowl over to Harry and sets about peeling open a second can of baked beans.

Harry takes the bowl doubtfully. “Where’d you learn this, then?”

Niall pulls a little too hard on the lid and a trail of watery bean juice dribbles onto the toe of his boot. “Not everyone’s dad has a cabin lying about,” he says quietly, holding out his hand for another paper bowl.

Harry hands it over silently. Then, watching Niall pour out the can, “Sorry. I didn’t mean –”

“It’s nothing,” Niall says. “Just, what do you say we put some Slim Jims in?”

“Pass,” Harry says, wrinkling his nose, so Niall sets about dropping in chunks of the Slim Jim he picked up at their last stop at a convenience store. “Americans and their food,” Harry observes, shaking his head. “What is it with them?”

“Mad,” Niall agrees, and they eat the rest of their meal in silence. 

Harry holds his phone up with the flashlight on so that Niall can examine the gas fireplace. Normally gas doesn’t get cut off when power does, especially if it’s got its own private store of propane feeding the flames. It’s the sparker that operates by switch. Niall tries to lift the dashboard plate beneath the gas fireplace, but it doesn’t come up.

“What is it?” Harry asks.

“Lower the light a bit,” Niall requests, so Harry stoops beside him. “Oh, hell. Look at this, they’ve screwed the plate down. Probably for insurance or something. Anyway, we can’t reignite the pilot light with it like this. Did you bring a screwdriver?”

Harry glances sideways at Niall. “Shit.”

Niall nods. “But hey, maybe the weather will be cleared up by morning.”

Harry flips the flashlight back around on himself, the hollows under his cheekbones thrust into severe contrast with the tops of his cheeks and the deep sockets of his eyes. “In case we make it till morning, you mean.”

“Shut up,” Niall snorts, laughing despite himself. “Give me a hand up, would you?” So Harry reaches down and Niall clasps his hand, using Harry’s weight as leverage. The cold is doing mad things to his knee, almost feels like it’s frozen solid itself.

“Till morning, then?” Harry asks, and Niall nods.

He curls up under the blankets in his room fully-clothed. The door to his room is open, and he can hear Harry shuffling around his own room, the creak of his mattress as he settles beneath the covers. “Hope the others are okay,” Harry muses, in his slow, posh voice.

“Me, too,” Niall agrees. Then he rolls over, willing himself to sleep.

When Niall wakes up the next morning, he can tell that the snow hasn’t stopped coming down. Every sound in the big, empty vacation cabin is muffled and quiet, and the window in his room is blocked by a drift.

He tries to peer out of the window onto the deck overlooking snow-capped trees and the lake in the distance, but he can’t see anything but wave after wave of white snow. He heads upstairs to the loft level instead, his knee so sore and stiff that he has to turn sideways and take each step up with his good leg. He bends down to peer out, his breath fanning out in front of him.

“Shit” doesn’t seem to cover it, but that’s his first thought. He shivers just looking at it, and then he thinks about the car, and how it’s probably entirely buried in snow now. Niall swears under his breath, thinking about having to dig it out of the driveway in case snowplows come through. It’s not that hard of a labor when the snow is soft, but if it’s already hard and frozen solid. Too bad there’s not a garage to have left the car in.

“How bad is it?” Harry asks, making Niall jump. His voice is low and raspy with sleep, and half his hair is stuck to the side of his head and the other half is stuck straight up like some kind of alien antennae, and it’s a struggle not to laugh at the sight of him.

“Not good,” Niall answers, stepping back to let him see.

Harry contemplatively rubs his chin while he looks out. “D’you reckon we ought to batten the windows?” he asks.

Niall cocks his head. “Batten the windows?”

“It was in a book I read,” Harry admits. “So that all the heat doesn’t leak out, the cold can’t get in. We can tape blankets up to the windows.”

“Have you got tape?”

Harry thinks on it. “In my bag, I think. Let me go look.”

“K. I’ll be right behind you,” Niall promises him. When he looks up, Harry’s worrying over his bottom lip, looking at Niall.

“Do you need some help?” he swallows. “Just, I’ve seen you –”

“It’s just a bum knee, it’s not anything,” Niall says swiftly.

Harry seems to deflate a bit. “Right, well. Okay.” He takes the stairs fast as he can, maybe to prove something, maybe for some other reason. Niall chooses to concentrate on making it safely down the stairs and anything else they can do to stave off the cold instead.

He finds Harry rifling through his bag in the other bedroom. Harry’s actually decorated it, the oddball, with half a dozen pictures of two women who look like him. “Here we are,” Harry says, unearthing the duct tape.

“I guess we’ll need blankets,” Niall considers. “Have you seen a linen closet?”

Harry nods. “These are,” he shows Niall the shelf full of heavy blankets in the closet in the hall. “I feel like these might not hang up too well.”

“We can hang up the blankets from our beds,” Niall suggests. “Replace ‘em with these.”

Harry shrugs agreeably, so he and Niall set about duct-taping blankets over every window. Niall doesn’t anticipate how dark it’ll be inside the cabin when they’re done, or how still, like they’ve been buried alive in their own little snow cave. It makes him close his eyes and take a deep, deliberate breath, and when he opens them, Harry’s wobbling from his perch on top of the kitchen chair they’ve been dragging around with them.

“We’ll feel awfully silly when all this snow melts tomorrow and we’ve made a mess for no reason,” Harry says, using Niall’s shoulder for balance as he climbs down.

Niall replies, “I’d take feeling awfully silly over freezing to death, to be honest.”

Thinking on it, Harry decides, “Agreed.” He takes the chair back to the kitchen and Niall sits down on the couch, stretching his legs out on the coffee table. Harry perches beside him.

“So,” he asks slowly, “what now?”

Niall thinks on it. “Well,” he starts slowly, “we do have, like, ten cases of beer to get through.”

“Yes,” Harry nods solemnly. “We do.”

They make a game of it at first, because nothing is sadder than drinking to pass the time. At first, the rule is to take a drink every time either of them lose a piece in the game of checkers they unearthed in the rustic wooden game cabinet in the corner. Then the rule is to take a drink every time one of them moves a space. Finally, the game devolves to them setting the checkerboard aside and attempting to build the world’s tallest beer can tower.

“I think,” Harry starts, in his slow posh accent that goes higher the more he drinks, bless his soul, “that we could see to Paris from the top of the tower.”

“We’re not at, like, the Tower of London,” Niall hiccups. It has the very faint taste of vomit, and he swallows hard, squeezing his eyes closed. The room starts turning in circles the moment he closes his eyes, so he pops them open again quick, clutching Harry’s arm like Harry’s some kind of anchor.

When did Harry get so close? he wonders, even as Harry rests his elbow on Niall’s thigh for balance while he bends down to pick up another beer can. Niall leans forward in his seat and tries to put the can in line with their tower walls even though everything is moving about, not standing still. Maybe they’re having an earthquake. Earthquakes happen in Pennsylvania, don’t they?

Harry slumps into his side, trying to fit himself under Niall’s arm. “You have a natural talent, I have to say.”

Niall snorts. “What, cos I’m Irish? Or –” He cuts himself off, not sure what he meant to say.

Harry’s gone so still and cold against Niall, or maybe it’s just that Niall has only now realized that he’s like a little snowman. “Because you’re good,” Harry murmurs, pulling away. “I’m going to sleep.”

Funny, how somehow Niall’s side feels even colder without Harry there leeching heat from him. “Harry,” he tries.

“Good night,” Harry says softly. He closes the door to his room after him.

Niall lies awake shivering under his blankets for he can’t tell how long, he hasn’t checked his phone for the time because he’s trying to save on battery power until he can get a signal again.

They’d hung up the middling thick blankets, so he has one that feels like one of them ones that cowboys put on underneath their horse’s saddles, it’s so thick and coarse. He’s been horseback riding at a ranch just a few miles off campus for a laugh with Zayn and Perrie, and he can’t stop thinking about how horses stay warm shivering in their paddocks in the barn. Maybe the ranch hands brought out heaters when it got proper cold. Christ, what he wouldn’t give for a heater. Or for power. Hot coffee and the telly and his dad shaking out the newspaper, the pages rustling. Niall blinks slowly, half-dreaming.

Harry bumps the wall in the other room, and Niall listens absently to Harry toss and turn. He manages to lie still for about five minutes, and then he grabs the heaviest of his blankets and pads down the hall to Harry’s room. “I’m sorry,” he whispers to the lump of blankets that he reckons is Harry. “Budge up.”

Maybe Harry’s too drunk and tired to do anything but obey, but he scoots over to make room for Niall on the mattress. Niall throws his blanket over Harry and slides under the covers, curling up next to him. Harry whispers, “I read a book once where these dogs used to dig little snow caves for themselves in the fresh snow, and dig themselves out in the morning.”

“I don’t want to be buried alive,” is Niall’s brilliant response. “Does that really work?”

“Must,” Harry shrugs, shuffling closer. Niall can smell him in the brittle cold, toothpaste and some kind of musky warm cologne and that coconut oil he must put in his hair to keep it from curling so much. Their combined body warmth helps make their little cocoon of blankets tolerable, pleasant, even, and Niall’s drunken eyelids feel so heavy.

Niall’s not really thinking when he reels Harry in by his collar, except that it’d be nice to have his own personal heater that much closer to him. “Have to try that tomorrow.”

“If we survive the night,” Niall murmurs.

“Who needs tomorrow?” Harry answers.

The words sound familiar until Niall places them, and he says, “We’ve got tonight, babe,” and Harry snorts. Niall trades the lyrics of a Bob Seger song back and forth with him until he falls asleep.

Niall wakes up to Harry snoring in his ear. He also wakes up with an incredible need to pee. He slides out of bed, the cold hitting him like a brick wall. Niall sucks a breath in through his teeth and high-tails it to the bog, where he pees for so long that he almost nods off over the toilet again. When he’s done, he zips his trousers back up and flushes the toilet.

Correction. Tries to flush the toilet. The toilet gives a long, low moan when the cistern starts dumping water into the toilet bowl, and then most of it gets flushed away. Most. Niall curses softly under his breath. It’s like there’s a stoppage in the toilet, but it’s probably not a clog. It’s probably that the pipes under the house are half-frozen. Niall tweaks the faucet on the sink and a thin dribble of water comes out.

Well, that’s a bit shit. Niall bites his lip, and then he rubs his hands on his jeans. He takes the stairs up to the loft to peer out the window, and snow is still swirling down from the iron-gray clouds. Niall toggles the light switch on the wall without any real hope, and then he sighs, going to fetch his phone from the bedroom.

“Where’d you go?” Harry asks groggily, fisting his eyes like a child.

“We’re gonna have to shut off the water main or the pipes are going to freeze,” Niall tells him.

Harry stares up at him, blinking slowly. “We’re really going to be living on beer, then.”

Despite himself, Niall laughs. “Seems like it.”

“Wait, let me come with you,” Harry says, throwing back the blankets. He makes a face like the cold is actually painful to him, and then he hops into his suede boots. He’s already wearing what looks like three pairs of socks, and a pair of flannel sleep pants over his jeans. It’s not a bad idea, actually. “Jesus. I never thought I’d say this, but I miss winters back home.”

Niall thinks about all the overtime his dad worked around the holidays, and how quiet the house would be when Niall got back from one of his friend’s, dark without a Christmas tree. Not that any of that stuff ever mattered, but sometimes he’d be around when Sean or one of his other mates were making up the tree and hanging garland with their mums, and he’d wonder what he was missing. “Me, too,” he just says.

He opens the door to the basement and he can instantly feel the temperature drop, all the cold air sunken to the bottom floor like Arctic seawater. Harry’s eyes widen, and when Niall looks round at him, he can picture the breath freezing on Harry’s face. “At what point do we try digging out the car, d’you think?”

“I’m not sure that’s an option anymore,” Niall says, his boots clopping on the wooden stairs. “How close is the nearest town?”

Harry just groans instead of answering, and Niall laughs again, even though he doesn’t mean to. The air is so cold that it hurts, his ears and nose and the tips of his fingers numb even before he reaches the bottom of the stairs. “Turn the flashlight on,” Niall whispers, same time as Harry presses the button for the app. “The water main is usually either a, like, crank, or a valve.”

“How do you know all this?” Harry asks.

“The house I grew up in,” Niall says. “My da was always having to fix things.”

Harry thinks this over while Niall stumbles through the basement full of spare furniture, mildewed cardboard boxes, and leftover crap from previous renters. There’s two suitcases that feel full when Niall stubs his toe against them, a rattling box full of cooking supplies someone must not have been bothered to clean up, a piñata, several plastic tubs full of Christmas decorations someone must’ve been too lazy to pack home, and what looks like a pet carrier. Niall tries not to wonder what happened to the pet.

“It was nice of him,” Harry ventures. “To, like, show you what to do.”

Niall mulls that over, running his fingers over the wall so that he doesn’t miss the pipes or water main. He’s wandered too far from Harry’s light, Harry going slower and more careful on his unstable newborn giraffe legs. It’s weirdly endearing, at the minute. At the time, he’d just felt proud to be his dad’s helper. He hadn’t thought that, like, his dad was trying to help him, at the same time.

“Is that it?” Harry asks, holding the phone aloft.

Niall stops, peering through the dimness, and then he catches sight of the valve Harry spotted on the wall. “Perfect, yeah. C’mere, bring the light closer.” There’s two valves, which he vaguely remembers from being a kid. He just can’t remember which one he and his dad ever closed. “I think,” Niall says, “it’s this one.” He points to the left.

“I bet it’s the right,” Harry says. “Statistically speaking, there are a lot more right-handed people than lefties. So, like, people tend to favor the right side on stuff. Where the spirals are on a notebook and gas and brake pedals and, like, probably valves, I bet.”

“How’d you know that?” Niall asks.

“I think I read it in a book.”

Niall shrugs. “Sounds like a good enough reason to me.” He rubs his hands together even though he’s wearing soft gloves, and then he tackles the valve. “Fuck.” He stops when his back starts to feel like it might snap. “It’s frozen. Bring the light over? Yeah, look at that.” There’s a puddle of frozen water beneath the valve.

“We’ll do it together,” Harry suggests. “Come on, try again.”

Even with both Harry and Niall putting their backs into it, the valve refuses to turn. “Well,” Niall starts.

Harry grunts, “Not yet,” and puts his hands on top of Niall’s, at the top of the valve. The valve gives an inch, and Harry lets out a war whoop.

“C’mon, not done yet,” Niall says. It’s bad luck to celebrate before the battle’s won, and all. It’s grueling work, turning the damn rusted valve, but eventually they get it shut. An extra layer of silence descends over the house as even the water stops running in the pipes.

“I just had a creepy thought,” Harry says.

“Please don’t tell me.”

“I don’t want to be the only one having the thought, though,” Harry says, nervously pressing close to Niall’s back as Niall makes for the stairs. “Do you ever feel like we’re, like, shutting down this house, one organ at a time?”

Niall stops, and Harry bumps into him. “I knew you were going to say something weird as shit, and somehow, you still surprised me.”

“Yeah?” Harry asks, grinning when Niall glances at him over his shoulder. “We should see if they have Scrabble in the game cabinet. I’m a fantastic Scrabble player.”

“Yay, Scrabble,” Niall mutters, Harry prodding him up the stairs to go faster. Niall grins despite himself.

Harry talks while he plays, which initially Niall thought was a diversionary tactic. Now he realizes Harry just wants to be friends. “My mum’s friends all agreed I was the cutest lad,” Harry’s saying, and then Niall groans and throws a pillow at his face.

“Does anyone believe you when you talk?”

“I never lie,” Harry gasps, clutching his tit. Niall moves his hand over a bit on his chest.

“Don’t even know where your heart is,” he clucks, and Harry makes a face that might be alluring if he didn’t better resemble a frozen statue. “You look cold.”

“Do you think the snow could cover the whole house?” Harry asks, pinching his bottom lip. “You don’t reckon the others were on the road when the storm hit, do you?”

Niall shrugs helplessly. “We left a message. I was thinking…if the snow is lighter tomorrow, we should try walking to town. We can get a space heater, or a hotel room.”

Harry lets out a sound of relief. “Ring the others, as well. I read this short story once about how phone booths were disappearing,” he volunteers. “They’re, like, ephemeral spaces. I think that’s what the bloke called them.”

“Yeah? What’s that mean?”

“They, like,” Harry says, his brow furrowing as he deals them both handfuls of tiles. Niall arranges them alphabetically on his little shelf. “You know, think about all the stuff that happens over the phone.” Niall got the news that he was accepted to uni on a phone call from his da when he was playing footie on the pitch with the lads. He found out his nan fell down the stairs on a phone call from his mum, and Greg rung him to tell him that Theo had been born. Lots of things happen over the phone.

Niall plays his first word, _ornery,_ and Harry flashes him a grin. “‘Ordinary places where extraordinary events have occurred,’” he recites. “That’s what life is supposed to be, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Niall says, even though he’s wondering if you can ever know something extraordinary is happening at the time. Usually you’ve got to look back on it to see it.

Harry’s a _decent_ Scrabble player. He’d be better if he stopped trying to play the most creative word and just went for points, instead. “I’m an _aesthete_ , Niall,” he says when Niall points this out. Niall leans into the beer can clutched in his own hand. “I’m _avant garde_.”

“You’re going to lose,” Niall says, amused.

“Not so,” Harry laughs, playing “WILLIES” on a triple-score tile for a whopping twenty-four points.

“So much for the rules of decorum,” Niall smiles, slumping back in his seat. He should tighten the blanket over his shoulders, but he’s too drunk and sleepy to bother.

Harry fiddles with the letter tiles on his own little shelf, considering his options. “My family’s, like, upper middle class at best.” Niall stays quiet to let Harry say more, or less, as he wants. “And that’s, like, because my mum married my step-dad.”

He catches sight of the grin sneaking across Niall’s face and he backpedals quick, his voice taking on a whining note. “Not that she, like, is not that kind of woman at all, honestly, Niall Horan, the mere accusation – get over here.” He makes a desperate grab for Niall’s shoulder and gets his arm instead, and Niall gamely leans into Harry when he tugs on Niall’s collar. Harry inadvertently gets a mouthful of Niall’s hair and huffs out a warm laugh into the top of his head, and Niall pulls away.

“Me dad’s a butcher at Tesco,” Niall supplies, even though Harry hadn’t asked. “He’s going into his thirty-third year, I think. The company gave him a watch for his thirtieth anniversary. I think he’s worn it every day for the past three years.” 

Harry’s eyes soften. “I bet you’re just like him.”

“What, blue collar?” Niall laughs.

“I’m not trying to offend you,” Harry says quietly.

Niall sobers. “I didn’t mean it like that. He is.”

“And so are you,” Harry guesses. “You’re like Walter Cunningham.”

“Who?” Niall laughs. He plays his next word, _doldrum,_ and Harry hums appreciatively.

“From _To Kill a Mockingbird,_ ” Harry just says. He rubs at his nose and winces like his snot’s frozen inside his nostrils. It’s a very real possibility. He turns his head as if to stare out the window onto the deck and, beyond that, snow-covered pine trees and a mostly frozen lake. “Can’t believe it’s Christmas in a few days. Think we’ll still be snowed in here?”

Niall shrugs. He guesses, “I bet this isn’t how you usually spend your Christmas holidays.”

“It is, actually,” Harry admits, biting his bottom lip. He smiles around it and Niall finds himself smiling back, Harry looks so like a mischievous kid. He’s got such a kind face when he smiles. “On Christmas Eve, my mum and my sister Gemma and I, we’ll spend most of the morning working on a puzzle and then my mum always makes us cheese toasties and tomato soup for lunch, and after that we’ll play board games and then go caroling with the neighbors.”

Harry catches sight of the smile on Niall’s face and laughs. He looks a little self-conscious; not in an embarrassed way, exactly, but as if he’s trying his hardest not to gush. He seems like a proper sop. “I know that sounds so, like, _Leave it to Beaver,_ or whatever, but. I don’t know. I miss them.”

“Yeah, it’s – I know what you mean. Traditions, and stuff. D’you grow up with a tree, too?”

Harry just hums. Then his head pops up quick. “Niall,” he starts, so that Niall goes still and a little suspicious, “in the basement, did you see –”

Niall’s groaning before he can even finish getting the question out. “You want to decorate this place?”

“Just see what they’ve got,” Harry says, already standing up. He wraps a blanket around himself and almost trips stepping past Niall on his way to storm the basement for Christmas decorations. “C’mon. It’d be fun, and this place is kind of depressing without it. We want Santa to feel welcome, don’t we?”

So Niall helps Harry heave the plastic tubs full of aged Christmas decorations up the basement steps. They’re both breathing hard by the time it’s over, and it’s the first sweat Niall has worked up since they brought the groceries in from the car. Harry’s skin steams gently, the air is so cold.

They lay it all out on the floor and spend so much time arguing about where the garland and the holly and the crumbling paper chains ought to be hung that they have to take a break for powdered donuts and crisps. They compromise on wrapping garland around the banister on the staircase and hanging the paper chain from the bottom of the staircase, even though Niall’s reminded more of a birthday than Christmas.

When it comes to the tree, Harry takes full direction. “Never knew these fake ones were so hard to put together,” Niall observes, when he and Harry keep messing up the matching system for branch to the spot on the faux tree trunk.

Harry scratches his head. “Me, neither. Usually we got a real one. How’s this look?”

“Is it the right branch?”

“No, but I think this will look better than putting it down there.”

Niall just shrugs, so Harry sets about putting the tree together the way he thinks it should be.

“In retrospect,” Harry admits, when his tree looks more like a garbled cylinder of faded plastic pine tree branches, “the instructions may have had a point.” Niall helps him take the tree apart and put it back together, and then Niall works on reattaching the metal hooks to whichever ornaments aren’t smashed to bits so that Harry can hang them. “Wish we had some candy canes to hang up here, too.”

“I’d eat those,” Niall says, and Harry laughs.

The Christmas tree is wired with electrical lights, but there’s no power to light it when they’re done. Still, it’s a sight to behold, the rumpled Christmas tree strung up with their salvaged Christmas decorations and the chain they made themselves out of silvery gum wrappers.

“That turned out great,” Harry grins. He turns and envelops Niall in a hug, and Niall freezes before he remembers to hug Harry back. He doesn’t smell so much like coconut oil and his cologne, now. He smells too much like Niall himself.

They tuck in under their small mountain of blankets. Harry’s breath fans out over Niall’s face and normally it’d be so gross, but it just smells like the gum they’d both been chewing. Harry touches Niall’s face gently as if to get his bearings, and then he murmurs, “I hope Santa likes what we’ve done.”

“The others, as well,” Niall adds. He’s been trying not to think of it but hopefully Liam and Louis and Perrie and Zayn are alright. They’ve no way of knowing if they’re not, or of helping, but that doesn’t quell Niall’s anxiety to know.

“They’re going to love it,” Harry just says.

Niall dozes off when Harry starts snoring, but he jerks awake after no more than an hour of rest. He can tell, because he hasn’t rolled over onto his own arm and put it to sleep yet. Niall pushes back the blankets like he has somewhere he can take a walk to and work off all his nervous energy, but really he’ll probably just go check the blankets over the windows and peek outside in the hopes that the snow will all have miraculously melted.

Harry is so cold that his lips are blue, and Niall only weighs up the pros and cons for a minute before he slips out of bed and heads for the gas fireplace. The landlord can deal with insurance.

Niall stops by the basement first to dig out one of the table knives he spotted yesterday when he and Harry were looking for the water main, and then he carries it upstairs. If removing aged screws by hand with a table knife sounds tedious and frustrating and time-consuming, then it is what it sounds like. It doesn’t even work, at first, until he ruins the blade of his pocket knife whittling the table knife to best fit dimensions. Niall’s hands keep going numb, to boot, and then he has to breathe on them until he can hold the knife between his fingers again.

He thinks it must take a solid two hours, if the way he has to get up three times to stretch out his knee is any indication. At long, long last, the dashboard panel comes away. Niall lets out a quiet cry of triumph. Then he stretches out on his stomach to reignite the pilot light, hoping to God that gas hasn’t been leaking into the house for the past three days. The tiny pilot light flickers to life without igniting the house like a firebomb, though, and from there it’s easy to add gas to the flame by twisting the valve until there’s a crackling fire going in the hearth.

Harry makes a strangled noise, and Niall pops his head up to watch him struggle to sit up in bed. His hair looks like a small brown storm cloud all around his head. “Niall!” he yelps. “The house is on fire!”

“Yeah, in a good way,” Niall agrees. Harry looks at him in total confusion for a long, long moment.

“We’re not on fire?”

“Better, we have fire,” Niall says.

Harry crawls over the side of the bed and shuffles into the living room. He all but collapses on top of Niall with a blanket tugged up around his shoulders. “Oh, my God,” he breathes. “You’re brilliant.”

“Yeah, well. Remind me to get a screwdriver when we go into town tomorrow. Today. Whatever the fuck day it is.”

Harry wiggles himself into the hollow spaces of Niall’s body. He’s wearing three shirts, a zip-up jacket, and his parka on top of that, as well as two pairs of trousers and three pairs of socks, but Niall thinks he can still feel how warm Harry is.

Until, that is, Harry shoves his icy hands up the back of Niall’s shirt. “I had to do it!” he laughs, the lines by his mouth so deep. “I’m like a man dying of starvation in the desert. You’re my tall drink of water.”

“Um, Harry,” Niall starts, because he’s quite sure that Harry’s bungled that phrase, but Harry’s already started trying to get his head under the scarf around Niall’s throat, so Niall opts to make sure neither of them accidentally get strangled to death, instead.

It’s really not all that comfortable on the floor, though, so Harry and Niall set about dragging all the blankets from the bed in Niall’s room and heaping them up right in front of the fireplace. Harry, their self-named “culinary genius,” bravely ventures out of their cocoon to rustle up something for them to eat.

“This isn’t working,” Harry sighs, after half an hour of holding half a potato to the glass front of the fireplace. “Roast, potato.”

“I don’t think it works like that,” Niall says dryly. He watches Harry try to take a bite out of the raw potato. “Shame we didn’t think to bring hotdogs or marshmallows.”

“Still couldn’t cook it,” Harry sighs, leaning back until his head hits Niall’s stomach. He stretches his legs out toward the fireplace, sighing comfortably. He’s taken off all but one layer of socks, and last time Niall came out of the toilet, he’d been wiggling out of his trousers so that he’s just sat around in his thermal underwear.

Niall thinks aloud, “You know that thing, Occam’s Razor? Wait, no, not that. Murphy’s Law.”

Harry adopts his best Texan accent, “‘Murphy’s Law doesn’t mean that something bad can happen. It means that whatever _can_ happen, will happen.’”

“Shut the fuck up,” Niall laughs. “I love that movie. But yeah, that. Either we’ll run out of gas, or one of us will get hurt and we’ll have to struggle into town. I’ll probably die of frostbite along the way.”

“This isn’t a horror movie,” Harry says, snorting. He sits up fast, his hand flailing out so that he hits Niall’s face. “Niall. I’ve just thought. How is Santa meant to come down the chimney if we’ve got a fire going?”

Niall drops his voice to a whisper. “Harry, dear,” he starts in a tone he usually reserves for Theo, “love, the thing about Santa –”

Harry covers his mouth, laughing. “Shh, shh, don’t finish that. Listen, though.” The light actually seems to be dancing in Harry’s eyes, the way the firelight is reflected. “Obviously this is a holiday film. Oh, God, I hope it’s _Home Alone._ ”

Niall starts to argue with him, and then he just sighs. “Eh, maybe you’re right.”

Harry settles back down with his giant head on Niall’s gut. “You smell like Red Hots and beer,” he says, out of nowhere. “I like it.”

“Well,” Niall says. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Harry answers politely, folding Niall’s hand around his for warmth.     

***

 “Well, well, well,” someone drawls. Something hard and cold nudges Niall’s face, and he automatically twitches away.

“Fuck off,” he says reflexively. It hurts to blink his eyes open in the blinding light streaming in from the uncovered windows.

Wait. What?

Niall blinks some more, struggling up until he’s propped up on his hands. Harry’s arm tightens around his waist, and Niall kicks him awake. “What?” Harry sighs, turning his head. He peeps one eye open at Niall. “Is it Santa?”

He’s not wearing a shirt, and his skin looks so warm and soft, Niall wants to run his palm up Harry’s arm just to feel it. Instead, he says, “No, it’s your damn friends.” He’s so delighted to see Louis’s mad grinning face that his heart feels buoyed up on a flute of champagne. If the way Louis is grinning at him past the way he’s trying to smirk, then he’s just as happy to see Niall. He extends his hand and helps pull Niall to his feet, and then he pulls Niall into a hug. He smells just the same, like Cheetos and Liam’s deodorant, and Niall squeezes him hard. “Happy birthday,” he tells Louis.

“Prior to breakfast they’re your friends,” Harry drones, rolling over and sitting up. Louis releases Niall. Harry sets about tying his hair back in a bun, and Niall listens to the house. He can hear the AC unit running outside and the fan whirling upstairs in the loft, and he lets out a relieved breath that they hadn’t actually had to struggle into town by foot.

Instead, he has Louis’s leering face to deal with. The longer he looks at his and Harry’s blanket version of a snow cave, the itchier and more irritable Niall feels. “Wipe that look off your face or I’m going to punch you,” Niall grumbles.

“What, for interrupting your cozy little snugglefest? Please, don’t let me stop you,” he cackles.

Niall trades an exasperated look with Harry. “Are the others here?” he asks, even as Liam, Zayn, and Perrie struggle through the door with their bags. Louis’s dropped his right in the entryway, and Liam trips over it on his way in, almost face-planting onto the couch.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on here?” Zayn asks, a smirk spreading over his face.

“You missed half the vacation,” Harry says, the last of the blankets sliding off his shoulders when he stands up.

Zayn drops his bag on the couch and flops on after, his bony limbs spread-eagle. “It’s a miracle we made it,” he sighs dramatically, like he did anything more than nap in the backseat all the way up here. Niall knows how Zayn is. “Or are you not happy to see us?”  

“Obviously I’m delighted,” Harry says, stooping to drop a kiss on Zayn’s forehead. Then he makes as if to bite Zayn’s eyebrow. “You didn’t bring me any Chick-Fil-a, though, did you?”

“Sorry, love,” Zayn grins. Harry pats him on the chest.

Harry moves toward the kitchen to cook, so Niall sets about folding up all their blankets. Then he thinks better of it. “You lot can fold these up, these are yours.”

“Are they sanitary?” Louis asks, so Niall throws a blanket at his face.

“Wait, what?” Perrie laughs. “You and Harry spent three days together and didn’t kill each other?”

Harry volunteers a very nice but also very unhelpful, “He’s a great cuddler,” so Niall decides to go take a shower.

Liam follows him into his room – well, the room he’d left all his crap in on that first night – and watches him dig around his bag for a clean change of clothes. “I’m glad you’re okay,” Liam says, and when Niall turns, he’s got that look on his face, like he needs confirmation. He’s been looking at Niall that way since they were roped together as freshman roommates, and Niall huffs out a laugh and walks into Liam’s outspread arms. Liam hugs him so tight that his back pops, and Niall takes a moment to breathe him in, that smell like pine needles and Old Spice deodorant.

“I’m glad you didn’t die, too.” Niall says. He turns to switch the water main back on, and Liam follows along after. He always moves so fast he just about pushes his way to the front even though he’s got no clue where he’s going. “What happened to you lot, anyway?”

Liam pauses to let Niall reclaim the lead and show him the basement door, and the steps down. This time, when Niall opens the door, the cold isn’t so much like an iron wall bearing down on him but like an ice bath. He steps down into it with his teeth clenched.

“We were thirty minutes down the road when the storm hit,” Liam sighs. “We spent three days all holed up in one tiny hotel room.”

“Zayn and Louis got along?” Niall asks. Part of him doesn’t even want to ask. Let them sort it out themselves.

Liam shrugs. “When there wasn’t anything else to do, so yeah, like peas and carrots. Two peas in a pod, or whatever. But, I don’t know. I’ve such a soft spot for Zayn.”

Niall nods like he knows what he means, because maybe he does. They’ve all got soft spots for each other except Niall and Harry, who up till a few days ago had never spent more than a handful of hours together. Love like that makes it hard to see straight. “Well, it’s gotta be better than almost freezing to death in this house with Harold as your only company.”

“He’s sweet, isn’t he?” Liam asks, like he can’t hear the tone of Niall’s voice. He gives Niall a nudge with his elbow. “Isn’t he?”

“Help me turn this fucking valve so I can shower,” Niall just laughs, and he and Liam work together to get the water main flowing again.

Hot water after two and a half days of below-freezing temperatures is so good that Niall almost starts crying. Almost. He stands under the hot water for longer than he should, just letting it beat down on his shoulders and fill the bathroom with tendrils of steam that make his clothes stick to him when he tries to hop into his jeans.

He realizes he’s forgotten to bring a shirt to wear under his scratchy jumper into the loo with him, so he steps out of the bog in just his socks and jeans. Zayn and Perrie are in Niall’s room when he walks in, the room seething with the quiet tense silence of unspoken words, and he starts to turn around and walk right back out when Perrie says, “No, Niall, it’s alright. I was just leaving.” She shoulders past Niall smelling like her perfume and her flat, and the sofa that’s one of Niall’s favorite places around campus to nap on.

“What’s the matter?” Niall asks Zayn slowly, even though he knows he probably shouldn’t. Not that he doesn’t care, but because he does. It sucks, seeing someone you love making a mistake and not having the words or worse, their trust, to stop them.

Zayn just pokes Niall’s collarbone so that his skin turns pale for a second before the color rushes back in. “You’re so pale, you’re like a snowman,” he laughs. “It’s nothing,” he adds, more soberly.

“Give me a break, you know I burn after ten minutes in the sun,” Niall laughs, rifling through his bag. He comes up with a long white shirt and pulls it on over his head, his wet hair spraying runaway water droplets so that Zayn wipes at his cheek, a smile curling over his face. Niall pulls on his heavy jumper next, the wool one with the scratchy elbows. It’s warm and everything, but he hates bending his arms in the damn thing unless he’s got something else on under.

Harry hollers from the kitchen, “Food’s ready! Come eat!” so Niall and Zayn move to obey, Zayn slinging his arm around Niall’s shoulders on the way out. Liam and Louis are already sat at the table with Perrie at the head, a look on her face of patient exasperation. Zayn sits at her elbow, Niall beside him, and Harry bustles over with a heavy steaming baking tray.

A plate of crispy turkey bacon, a heaping platter of cheesy scrambled eggs, and a serving bowl full of cubed fruit are already laid out on the table. Harry sets down the tray of American biscuits and what look like cream cheese Danishes, and then he settles beside Niall.

“You made this? You can actually cook?” Niall asks.

Harry beams, unfolding a paper napkin across his lap. “Yeah.”

Niall looks round at the others, but they don’t seem to be surprised in the least. “You tried to bake a potato against the fireplace for half an hour, gave up, and ate a bag of crisps. I thought –”

“You underestimate me,” Harry waggles his fork in Niall’s face. “Eat up, everyone.”

“Shouldn’t we say grace?” Perrie asks. “Because, like, no one died in the snowstorm and – and everyone’s getting along?” she adds lamely.

Louis raises his hands like a Southern preacher. “Bless this food and bless our luck at the gambling tables tonight, I want to walk away rich. Yeah?”

Liam shrugs. “Good enough for me.”

“We’re going to the casino tonight?” Niall asks, crumbling his bacon over his eggs. He mixes it all together and tears a roll in half so that he can make a breakfast sandwich out of it. Harry puts some fruit on his plate while he’s got his hands full, and Niall glares at him. Harry just pretends he can’t see it.

Niall knows he got an itinerary in his inbox but he also remembers glancing at it, reckoning that Louis hadn’t gotten his hands on it yet, and figuring it was more a rough draft than anything.

“Yes, for my birthday,” Louis reminds him impatiently.

Niall pauses. “Wait, doesn’t that make it Christmas Eve? Tomorrow’s Christmas?”

“Has been all day,” Liam says, going for his third roll. Not that Niall blames him, Harry’s actually…a good cook. He tries to tell him so but his mouth is so full of good, hot food that Harry just frowns and pats him on the back like he might be choking.

Niall manages to swallow. “Okay. Sounds good.”

“I need at least two of you at the same blackjack table as me, and you have to do it because it’s my birthday,” Louis starts, so Niall zones out and focuses on eating. It’s good to be back on familiar territory, with Liam nodding along intently and Zayn rubbing Perrie’s knee under the table. Like he’s at home here with his little found family as he ever was at home with his da and Greg bickering over who got the last Christmas cracker.

Niall packs all of his shit up so that Zayn and Perrie can have (formerly) his bedroom. It’s not so much that he’s being kind as he doesn’t want them fucking on the couch so that he doesn’t have anywhere to sit the next day. He carries his stuff up to the loft level just to keep it out from underfoot and finds Harry up there, arranging a pallet of blankets on the floor.

“I figured I might be too drunk or tired later to do this, and it’s bad for my back,” Harry explains.

“Yeah. Here, give me the other end, I’ll help you set it up.”

So Niall helps Harry spread the blankets, one on top of another, on the floor. Harry drops the last pillow near what he must’ve decided is the head of the bed, and then he sighs, putting his hands on his hips. “Where are you sleeping, by the way?”

“Couch, I reckon. Thanks for leaving that to me, by the way.”

Harry shrugs, fussing with the ends of his hair. His hair is greasy from two days without a shower, and he’s got acne emerging on his forehead, and Niall realizes he’s a little fond of his soft face. Maybe from familiarity, like. Now that he’s spent so much time looking at him. Harry stoops to pick up a couple of little pieces of paper or, no, they’re the pictures he had hanging in his old room. Niall watches him carefully attach the pictures to the exposed beam beside his bed.

“Who are they?”

“My mum and my sister,” Harry answers. He glances over his shoulder at Niall so Niall moves closer to see them better. They really do look eerily similar, especially in the picture of the three of them on slides. Like they might could be siblings, really, instead of mother and children. “This is my first Christmas without them.”

Niall wonders whether he should ask. “You could’ve flown back in time,” he says. “The rest of our study abroad program did, I think.”

“I know,” Harry says softly. “But, I don’t know.” He drops his voice low and Niall stoops to hear him better, and somehow it’s like they’re curled up underneath a small mountain of blankets again, just the two of them and the empty space between them. And the need for warmth. “I want to do it all, you know? I want everything. I thought I, like. Wanted it more than them.”

“And do you?” Niall asks.

Harry shrugs, smiling weakly. “Ask me again tomorrow.”

“Look at you two lads telling secrets,” Zayn says, the top of his head popping up over the edge of the loft. The rest of his head, and then his body follows as he mounts the stairs. “I always thought you’d be great mates.”

“We’re not mates,” Harry says, so that Niall’s head snaps around to him. “We’re survival buddies.”

“Could use one of them meself,” Zayn says softly, glancing over his shoulder like he’s afraid Perrie might be there. Or Louis. Hard to tell, sometimes, which of them he feels more bound to. Zayn goes boneless onto Harry’s pallet bed, and Harry just crawls up beside him. Niall figures, might as well, right? And lies himself on Zayn’s other side. “Can you boys keep a secret?”

Niall stares up at the vaulted ceiling of their rental cabin.

When Louis pitched this trip at the start of term, he’d called it a family trip. They’ve been taking them all over England and the UK and Europe for the past two years, every time they could piss off from campus for three days.

Traveling is cheap when you sleep on the plane or the train. Louis took Liam and Niall to Paris with him in the middle of their first term together, and then he and Zayn went on some kind of weird spiritual trip to Madrid to watch a footie match. It was Zayn’s first flight ever. They’d taken the Eurorail to Norway for a lads’ weekend spent unsuccessfully fishing and getting high, staring at icebergs.

A family trip. Strange, how it’s starting not to feel so much like one of many as one of the last. Just, everything will be different when they graduate. Niall won’t have Zayn practically living on his couch during term anymore, and they won’t go out on Thursday nights just so that they can go to class half-drunk on Fridays. They won’t spend weekends living in the library together anymore, studying for exams and praying for death.

Different, and not worse, exactly. But not the same. Kind of like the way Zayn’s been, really.

“Yeah,” Harry eventually says. “I can keep a secret.”

“I’m not going back,” Zayn says softly. “I got a job offer here in the states, from the place I interned at. I’m going to finish my degree here.”

Zayn’s words sink into Niall’s stomach like missiles into the ocean. He folds his hands over his gut just to feel the way the bombs go off beneath the surface of the sea. “You’re not coming back?” he asks softly.

Zayn curls his arm, squeezing Niall closer to him. “No, Nialler.”

“Congratulations,” Harry says. “That’s amazing.” Niall listens to Zayn animatedly kiss the top of his head, and he wonders what Louis will say. What Perrie will say. He takes a deep, deep breath and tries not to let it out in a sigh.

“Yeah, Zaynie,” Niall says. “Good for you.”

Liam comes to round them up, but not before taking a picture of Zayn and Harry dozing on Harry’s pallet bed, Niall not far behind. Liam’s face when he pulls his camera away from his eye is wearing the cheesiest smile Niall’s ever seen, and Niall’s heart pangs with how much he appreciates him. Good old steady Liam. “Perrie’s got the car warming up,” Liam tells them. “Does anyone want to come to town with us?”

“I’ll come,” Niall volunteers, Zayn’s arm falling away when he sits up.

Harry lifts his head an inch, his eyebrow raised, and says, “Yeah, I’ll come too.” They leave Zayn asleep on Harry’s bed, his mouth already open and set to drool all over Harry’s pillow. They put their parkas on and pile into Perrie’s cute Volkswagen beetle. Louis’s sat shotgun, tuning the radio to Top of the Pops, or whatever they call it in the States.

“Zayn’s not coming?” Louis asks.

Niall should probably tell him that Zayn’s not coming now, nor is he coming back to England, he knows. He might. He could, if he were Liam; his priority would be Louis knowing things, and it’d be that simple. Instead, he stays quiet. Let Zayn sort his own life out, and all that. Niall knows better than to put himself in the middle of two people who love each other but can’t be around each other without bickering.

Harry opens his mouth to say something, and Niall kicks his foot, but Harry just pats his hand and says, “You know, Perrie, if you two want my spot in the loft, then –”

“Ha!” she laughs. “Sorry, dear. Fat chance.”

Survival buddies, Niall thinks, studying Harry’s profile. Okay.       

***

Liam corners Niall in the hardware aisle of the local grocery store, a shop called Qwik Mart that looks like something out of a Kevin Smith movie. Weeds shoot up through the cracks in the car park and Niall spots at least half a dozen fag – cigarette – stubs on the asphalt, as well as a couple of used Styrofoam drink cups. Even the snow is dirty, stained with yellow splotches that must be either gasoline or piss, depending on how optimistic you are.

It’s old, basically. And the closest shop to a campsite. Niall’s not bothered by it nearly as much as Harry is, and that’s mainly because the second Harry hops out of Perrie’s car, his legs go slipping off in opposite directions. He spends the rest of the walk with his hands firmly clenched on Niall’s shoulders, Niall threatening him if Harry pulled them both over. He’s not sure what he’d do, but. Something not good. Give him a wet willie, maybe.

Studying the shop’s mismatched tool section makes Niall a little nostalgic for the rusted green toolbox in the back of his da’s truck. It always had everything he needed in it, no matter what broke down.

Niall would wake up sometimes to his dad shouldering the front door open with the toolbox clutched to his chest, tools rattling inside, and he’d throw his legs over the side of the bed and hurry after him, shivering in their cold house if it was the heater that had gone out. Sometimes they’d go for coffee after, even though it made Niall sick one time when he was a kid, so he prefers hot chocolate. Those were good hours, riding shotgun in his da’s truck like he was so much bigger and older than he was. Niall thinks about Harry’s idea that maybe his dad was trying to help him, and, like. He’ll have to give the old man a ring tomorrow.  

“I have something secret to tell you,” Liam says, pressing in close to Niall like the teenaged cashier gives a shit what they’re talking about. Harry and Perrie are well distracted on the other side of the shop, looking at food for Christmas dinner. Niall can hear Perrie’s voice going up as she argues her side of the case: “Stuffing is the best part of Christmas, you Grinch,” against Harry’s “It’s the worst and if I’m the one having to cook…”

“Yeah?” Niall asks Liam. He’s looking for a Philip’s head screwdriver, but they’re surprisingly hard to find in these disorganized shelves. He grabs a couple of the kiddy nightlights just for kicks, remembering only the vague silhouette of Harry’s shoulders in the dark. They could’ve gone with one of these then. “Do you see a screwdriver?”

“Niall,” Liam says seriously. “Tonight, for his birthday, I’m going to ask Louis to move in with me.”

Niall glances around to make sure that Louis isn’t eavesdropping. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asks, even as he remembers tromping back to Louis’s room after a game of footie on their home campus, the whole place smelling of grass and sod and sweat, Louis’s mum’s leftovers in the fridge. Or Zayn’s mum’s. “Just, he’s kind of…a lot.” And they’ve only been dating for six months, even if Louis had been fiercely pining for Liam for the better part of a year and a half.

Liam nods quickly, like one of them decorative birds that dips its beak into a glass of water to demonstrate the power of inertia, or something. “It’s Louis, Niall,” he says firmly. It’s a total change from those first few months, when he’d been so concerned about who he was. “I’m sure.”

“Okay, then,” Niall says. “Um, why are you telling me?”

“Well,” Liam starts, stops.

Niall cottons on quick, his voice going up before he catches it. “You want me to move out?”

“No, I don’t want you to move out,” Liam says, his voice taking on that stubborn tinge like he’s offended he might’ve offended you. “Just. I dunno, it’d be nice to have our own place, you know?”

“I can’t live with Louis’s mates, they stink,” Niall says. Literally. Smelly boys.

“You don’t have to say yes,” Liam starts, placating, “and it isn’t, like, right away. I just wanted to let you know.”

“Great, perfect. Thanks for letting me know,” Niall snaps. He grabs the closest screwdriver at hand and marches down the aisle to pick up some Sour Punch Straws and one of those giant cans of Arizona Green Tea. He bumps into Harry on the paper goods aisle. “What are you doing?” he asks.

Harry rolls his eyes. “Perrie’s making me buy paper plates with Christmas pattern on.” He frowns. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just,” Niall rubs his forehead. “Shop doesn’t have the right screwdriver.”

“Could get the others to cover the loss,” Harry shrugs, laughing, so Niall moves the rest of the way down the aisle. Harry grabs a stack of paper plates with reindeer on, the dork. “Maybe we should get paper, make snowflakes. I’ve seen on Pinterest,” he admits. “Sometimes people cut up their books for snowflakes.” 

Niall widens his eyes in shock. “That’s sacrilege, isn’t it? Defamation of book?”

Harry laughs, and they head toward the bank of coolers in the back of the shop. “Not if the book’s old. Then it’s like being reincarnated.”

Niall hands Harry a white can, the Arizona Sweet Tea he’d been drinking on the way up here, and Harry hums appreciatively. They linger over the candy aisle for a long time, letting Louis and Liam bicker about the appropriate amount of toilet paper to buy for two days more.

“Is this where we’re hiding?” Perrie asks, elbowing Niall gently when she finds them.

“Can’t believe they’re moving in together,” Niall says, without really meaning to.

Perrie’s eyebrows go way up. “They are? But they’ve only been together for…”

Harry worries over his bottom lip, his eyes everywhere but on them. Yeah, not for long. Whereas she and Zayn have been together for… “I’m sure it’s nothing, Pez,” Harry volunteers. “I mean, maybe Liam’s totally jumping the gun and Louis will shoot him down and he’ll be heartbroken.”

“Yeah, because that’s the ideal result,” Niall mutters, slinging an arm around Harry’s shoulders and bringing him in closer. “Do you think he’ll say yes?” he asks Perrie, and then he’s hit with a pang of guilt for not telling her about Zayn’s plan. Maybe she already knows. Oh, yeah. Maybe she already knows and she’s just waiting for Zayn to tell the others.

Perrie laughs. “Yeah, no. I don’t know. I’m not sure which will be more entertaining. I can’t wait to watch them try not to kill each other next term.”

Harry’s head tilts onto Niall’s shoulder. Niall squeezes his hip, the best way he can think of to say _I don’t think she knows, either._

Quirking one eyebrow, Perrie says, “Quite close now, aren’t you too? Did something happen while you were snowed in together that we don’t know about?” She smiles encouragingly.

“Harry tried to bake a potato on the glass front of the fireplace,” Niall offers.

“Niall whined about his piss freezing –” Harry starts, grinning wildly. Niall claps a hand over his mouth.

“Ready to go, kids?” Louis calls from the front, so they obediently move toward the registers.

“I don’t think you’ve anything to be embarrassed about,” Harry muses as the bored cashier scans their items. “It’s not your fault if your penis broke off in the cold.”

Niall grabs one of the plastic bags off the belt, his cheeks flaming. “I said I wondered if it _could_ ,” Niall swears, but that doesn’t stop the rest of them from teasing him about it all the way into the restaurant next door to the grocery store, a place called the Backdraft Sports Bar and Grill.

The whole place smells of steak and chips and steak sauce, and Niall heaves a deep, deep breath. The have garland hung along the ceiling and Bruce Springsteen is crooning his cover of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” from the old-timey jukebox. Niall’s quite happy he decided to take a winter holiday with his friends.

Zayn drove himself up from camp in Liam’s car. Seeing Zayn behind the wheel always makes Niall laugh, because he’s such a dainty guy sat behind the wheel of a terrible busted Prius. Like one of Rembrandt’s portraits sat in the middle of a Munch painting.

Harry fumbles into the seat beside Niall’s, and Niall digs his elbow into Harry’s thigh just for being a prick. Harry curls over like Niall’s done him critical damage, although he peeks up through his curls to see what Niall’s doing like a disobedient child. “The absolute worst,” Niall mutters, flipping his menu open.

Zayn slips into the seat beside Perrie smelling of weed. It’s not uncommon, exactly, and they are on holiday. Just, Niall knows how Perrie hates it when he drives like that. She tenses, leaning away from him, and Zayn just stares blankly at his menu, a faint smile on his face. Niall kicks him under the table, and Zayn looks up blankly. “Did you save any for the rest of us?” Niall tries.

“Just for you,” Zayn answers, reaching across the table to cup Niall’s cheek. He’s such an idiot, but Niall presses a quick kiss to the inside joint of his thumb just to be safe. Just while he can, and Zayn’s here. Zayn puts his elbow on the table and slumps into his hand, blinking fondly at Niall. It hadn’t occurred to Niall until Zayn told him he wasn’t coming home with them that he hadn’t seemed happy lately, but maybe he hadn’t.

“How come he gets kissed and I get your pointy elbows?” Harry demands, the laughter lines dug deep in his face, like trenches.

Niall flips the page in his menu. “Because he’s promised to make me rich at the poker tables tonight.”

“Well,” Harry sniffs. He raises his glass to Zayn, who raises his back bemusedly. “May the best man win.”

They take the cars back to the cabin to get ready for the casino. It’s quite a process for everyone but Harry, who just undoes a couple of the buttons on his shirt and changes into a pair of unbelievably tight skinny jeans. “Like a lot of precious women,” Perrie comments fondly, when she peeks into the loo downstairs and finds Louis, Liam, and Niall all fixing their hair.

“Piss off,” Louis says cheekily. “It’s not like Zayn’s not got his own bog, chased the rest of us out with hairspray.”

Perrie fans herself. “My totally un-self-interested man.” She pats Louis’s shoulder and hangs a sprig of holly over the doorway on her way out, so that Niall’s made to kiss both Louis and Liam when he tries to leave the bathroom at the same time as them. It’s better than kissing both of them at once.

“You look nice,” Harry comments from where he’s sprawled on the couch. He rakes his eyes over Niall’s chicken legs like he hasn’t tried to fall asleep with his giant head crammed under Niall’s jumper before.

Still, for some reason, it makes Niall fidgety. Maybe it’s the way Harry’s looking at him, or maybe it’s the way his hair curls over the collar of his shirt, his hair touching his bare chest.

Zayn hustles out of the house the third time Liam honks to let him know they’re leaving him behind, and then they’re on their way to the casino.

Perrie tunes them to a Christmas carols station, and it’s nice, actually, sat between Louis and Liam in the backseat with Harry’s unruly curls in the middle seat in front of him. Sharing body heat and shivering a bit in the cold when Louis rolls down his window for one last smoke before they get inside, Louis’s coif dangerously on point. He looks like some kind of proper 30s gangster. When he meets Niall’s eyes in the rearview mirror, he winks just like Greg used to do when Niall was so small, and it makes Niall relax into his seat.

They lose Perrie and Louis and, by default, Liam immediately to the blackjack tables, so Zayn and Harry and Niall sally forth to the poker tables. Niall’s played plenty of poker with the blokes back home at the pubs he’d go to with his dad sometimes, mates from work that he’d spent the night playing cards with. Sometimes they’d go to some of those mates’ houses, so Niall hasn’t got a clear memory of them. Just a string of little houses like his own, blue collar men with deep worry lines etched into their faces.

By some strange miracle, Harry turns out to be remarkably good at poker. Niall’s good at keeping his face blank but no one can make sense of the big expressions Harry makes, so they both clean up quite nicely. Zayn’s worse off solely because he keeps betting everything he has on every turn. Sometimes he wins big. Sometimes he loses. He never walks away, though.

“I’m going to get a drink,” Zayn finally says. “Watch my chips, eh?”

Niall and Harry nod along. One hand, then two, go by, and finally Harry says, “You don’t suppose he got lost, do you?” Niall blinks and looks away from the table, and the casino hits him as if it’s the first time he’s ever seen it. The Mohegan Sun Casino has a giant art fixture hung from the middle of the room, like an icicle formation turned upside down, heaps of slot machines scattered all around like the minions of a big boss in a video game Niall might’ve played with Lou and Z.

“Oh,” Harry says softly, putting his hand on Niall’s elbow. Niall turns, and he sees Zayn at the bar, undeniably chatting up a pretty blond. “He’s…oh.”

Niall takes another sip of his mojito. “It happens,” he says quietly.

“Perrie doesn’t mind?” Harry asks quietly.

“It’s…complicated.” Although it’s not that complicated, really. Perrie loves him too much to leave him and Zayn doesn’t love her enough to stop cheating. Pretty cut and dry, really. Niall thinks about Zayn crying over all the dogs in the shelter that one time they tried to volunteer, though, and the way he talks to his sisters, and. That part is not so simple.

“It’s getting more complicated,” Harry says, squeezing Niall’s arm. Niall turns to find Perrie striding up to Zayn. She puts her hand on his shoulder and spins him around, and even though Niall can’t hear her over the constant _ching_ of the machines, he can tell she’s mad. Maybe this time they won’t get back together again.

Niall heaves a sigh. “We’ll fold, and I’ll take his chips to him, please.” The dealer doesn’t ask, just hands Niall the chips. Niall pockets them in his blazer and looks at Harry, who’s sliding off his stool beside him. “What say we avoid that for a bit, eh?”

“Survival buddies,” Harry nods solemnly. He picks up another cherry daiquiri on the way, his mouth stained so red that he looks a bit like a vampire. Niall catches himself wondering what Harry’s slick mouth would feel like on the side of his throat, and then he gives himself a shake. Christ. He’s coming unhinged, is what it is.

Maybe that’s why, when Harry suggests they check out the spa, he agrees. They’ve already spent half an hour knocking back shots of Fireball at the bar, so it sounds quite logical when Harry suggests it. They stagger into the lift, and Harry punches the button. “Oh, wait,” he squints, hitting another one. “Wait. What number was that?”

“I don’t know,” Niall admits, slumping against the wall. Harry stumbles into him for balance. He braces himself with his hands on Niall’s hips, and Niall can almost feel the heat of his palms through his jeans. He’s standing so close, almost hip-to-hip with Niall, and the smell of his musky cologne mixes with the fruity drinks on his breath.

“Cold,” Harry murmurs, pressing his cheek’s to Niall’s. The tip of his nose is cold against Niall’s ear, and he slides his hands under the hem of Niall’s jumper, so that he’s warming his hands on Niall’s stomach.

Niall puts his hands over Harry’s like he might be about to shove his hands away, but he stops before he can. Harry’s cold hands actually feel kind of good against his overheated skin, so he just holds them against his stomach. When Harry swallows, Niall can feel it against his cheek. Harry starts to slide his hands around to Niall’s back and the elevator doors ding open. They stumble out, Niall laughing because he’s not quite sure what else to do.

“Oh, shit, are we on the right floor?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Harry says, grabbing a handful of Niall’s coat so that he doesn’t fall over. “Look, see? It’s right there.”

“Oh. Oh, wait, hold on.” He stops Harry, holding him by the shoulders. “Be sober, okay?”

Harry looks doubtful. “I –”

“No, shh, look at me. You’re sober now. Okay?” Niall stares deep into his eyes, just like his mates used to when they’d be stumbling home just before dawn, when his da would be heading off to work. Christ, he was young then.

“You have really pretty eyes,” Harry manages. “Did you know there’s a little, like, gold in there?”

“Just don’t throw up,” Niall says, and they walk, totally not unsteadily, into the health spa. The woman at the front desk hands them a menu, which they pore over. “I want that,” Harry says, drunkenly stabbing his finger at the page. Niall takes it away from him to look. “Gold – something. What does it say, Niall?”

“Gold Vitality Facial,” Niall laboriously reads. “I want that. Wait, no. Do you have a hot tub?”

Harry busily reads the menu over Niall’s shoulder. “Wait, they have the antimicrobial nose hair wax. I want that.”

“If you get that I’m getting the Warm Honey Drizzle Massage.”

“Wait, okay,” Harry says. His brow furrows, and he sways into Niall. “Okay. I want the nose thing and the gold thing. Yes?” The front desk clerk nods agreeably. “And he wants the – whatsit? The honey thing.”

“Maybe I should get me chest waxed,” Niall thinks. For some reason it sounds like a good idea. One less thing to worry about.

Harry paws at Niall’s chest. “No, I like it,” he says.

“Well, alright.”

So the front desk clerk whose name badge is too blurry for either Niall or Harry to read leads them to the back. She shows them both to the same room, and Niall peers in curiously, but there’s two tables in. “Oh,” he starts, “we’re not –” And Harry pinches his elbow.

“What’s that for?” Niall asks, when the front desk lady is gone. He sits down heavily onto a table.

“What, you want to do this apart?”

Niall laughs. “You mean have strangers rub all over me with you in the room? Yeah, Harry, sounds like a hot date.”

Harry’s pupils actually dilate, the pervert. Niall’s laughing when the woman from the front returns with fluffy white bath towels and instructions to strip down. Harry’s naked before Niall can even struggle out of his shirt. He’s managed to keep a tan even despite the bitter winter, and his skin looks warm and soft. Niall has the idea that if he touched him, he wouldn’t just be – that it’d be more than just touching his skin, that he’d be, like, touching Harry.

Not that there’s any fucking difference. Whatever. Harry struts around like a peacock while Niall works himself down to his pants, and then Harry stops, coming closer with a pretend magnifying glass held up as if to investigate. “Just gotta check if it’s still there, heard there may have been an incident in the cold,” he jokes, and Niall puts his hand on his face to shove him away. Harry just licks his palm. “Looks good to me,” Harry announces, when Niall has his bathrobe tied on. Niall’s cheeks feel very warm.

“You’re going to traumatize the massage people, put your robe on.”

Harry obeys reluctantly, and then he lies down on his table with his hands folded over his stomach like he’s dying, or dead. “Survival buddy rule,” Harry says. “If it tickles, we both start laughing together.”

“You’re a child,” Niall says, closing his eyes against the way the room is bucking up and down. “But yeah, sure. If it’s a rule.”

“Rule number two,” Harry says softly. “I like you.”

“That’s a rule?” Niall asks.

Harry just says, “Yeah.”

“Well. S’pose you’re alright,” Niall tries, and Harry lets out a bark of laughter.

Their massage therapists arrive shortly thereafter, and Niall’s massage artist lays a towel over him and sets about trying to break his back, feels like. Niall’s head is turned, and he catches Harry’s eye without meaning to. It’s weirdly intense to have someone sorting away the tension in his back without ever looking away from Harry, who watches with intense interest.

“I used to be a baker,” he offers on a break while the therapist gets more of the juice, gel, massage oil stuff she’s using on Niall’s back. “You look like a lump of dough.” Harry’s artist paints gold onto his face, so that he looks a bit like one of them figures in Central Park who spend all day pretending to be statues.

“Please stop talking,” Niall says, and Harry just smiles.

He feels boneless and very heavy when the session is over, like his bones have been detached and reattached again, stiff without a little bit of wear and tear. He gets dressed while Harry sits up and they wheel in a little cart for his nose thing.

Right before they swab the inside of Harry’s nose, Harry muses, “This seems like it might hurt,” and then the gel goes in. Niall waits, slumped against his table, while the gel dries, and then quick as can be the therapist rips it, and all of Harry’s nose hairs, straight out. “God!”

“Good?” Niall asks, putting his hand on Harry’s bare shoulder without thinking about it.

Harry blinks away tears. “I can already feel the microbes anti-ing away.”

“Bless his heart,” Niall says, touching the top of Harry’s cheekbone.

He’s not quite sober by the time they’re back on the lift down to the gaming floor, but he feels a little peculiar. It’s the massage, he thinks, everything just on the verge of hurting but not. Harry’s slumped into the opposite corner, his face dazed like he’s either still reeling in pain or just too drunk to focus his eyes. When Niall looks at him, though, he looks over and catches Niall’s eye, half a smile on his face. He winks in a conspiratorial kind of way, and Niall winks back. They both laugh.

The lift doors open onto the main casino floor, and it’s easy to hear Louis’s voice skating over the top of the slot machines and the dealers’ shuffling hands and the conversational hum of everybody else. Niall doesn’t even want to deal with it, but he does, and Harry tags along at his side. Niall’s not even surprised that he’s there, which should maybe be odd, but he’s not got the time to deal with it right now.

They find Louis and Zayn half-hidden in a nook behind a bank of craps tables with bathrooms to either side of them. Their voices echo in the enclosed space, and Niall catches his breath when he sees Louis’s red face, the helpless expression on Zayn’s. He knows before it happens that Zayn’s going to go blank and emotionless, and he wants to warn him not to. He wants to warn Louis not to pay attention to it, because of course it’s not real. It’s just that Zayn doesn’t want Louis to know how vulnerable he really is.

“You’re my best mate,” Niall hears Louis say. He draws to a stop just far enough away that he could still turn and run, if he wanted to. Somehow, he can’t make himself go. “I just don’t get how you could, like, leave.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Zayn says, his accent pitched just the way Niall remembers it. Like it hasn’t softened up around Liam’s precise northern syllables or Niall’s own Irish brogue. “But I’m not happy. Christ, Lou, you think I want to graduate from school and turn around and be a teacher? Settle down in a little town with Perrie and raise our 2.5 children? That’s not me, you know that’s not me.”

Louis struggles with himself for a moment, and then he blurts, “But you’re _mine._ ”

“Not yours,” Zayn says softly. “Sorry, Lou. Not yours.”

He pushes past Niall on his way out, and he grabs Niall’s arm on his way by. He gives his bicep a strong squeeze, like the hug he can’t stick around for, and Niall lets him go.

Liam says from just the other side of the craps table – Christ, how had Niall not noticed him there? – “Guess he found out about Zayn staying, then.”

“You knew?” Niall gasps. Harry’s fingertips graze his palm, lightly, and Niall grabs his hand before he can pull away.

“Told me days ago, when we were stopped for gas on the way up here,” Liam admits.

“It’s all shit,” Louis says, his blue eyes wide. He’s breathing like he’s just run a marathon. “Zayn, and you for lying, and you two for knowing,” he points at each of them in turn. “Coming up here. It’s all shit.”

When he starts to walk away, Liam stops him. “Where are you going?”

Louis doesn’t answer, so Liam hurries after him.

“Do you think he’s headed back to the cabin?” Harry asks. He nervously squeezes Niall’s hand.

Niall shakes his head. “Nah, not if Zayn’s collecting his shit. He’ll be leaving, I expect.”

“Well,” Harry considers. “The bar’s still open.”

Niall lets out a breath of relief. “Yes, please.”

***

Niall’s been hammered before. Properly wasted, trashed. First when he was fourteen and Sean’s dad left a case of beer in the basement when he left home after another row with Sean’s mum for a week and a half. Second when he was sixteen and he’d been so nervous to talk to Holly at a party that he’d drunk himself into blacking out. Most recently on his twenty-first birthday, to celebrate the fact that he’d be able to drink when he was studying abroad in America.

He’s not quite at blackout drunk levels yet, but he thinks it might be close. “We gotta call a cab,” he tells Harry, who’s hugging a column for support. “We’re too drunk to drive.”

“You’re too drunk to drive,” Harry says, before animatedly attempting to make out with the column.

“Yes,” Niall tells himself. “Call a cab.” He stumbles out of the casino doors and sits down on the kerb outside just so that he won’t have to concentrate on standing upright and making a call at the same time, and then Harry flounders out and plops down next to him, his arse half on Niall’s leg. “Would you get off me? Yes, hi, I’d like a taxi.” The person on the other end of the line asks him what kind of pizza he’d like again, so Niall hangs up and clicks the link to a taxi company straight from the Safari page, because his life is a disaster and he’s given up.

The taxi woman says it’ll be just a few minutes, so Niall just slumps backward so that he’s staring up at the stars. Harry copies him, mostly because he’d been using Niall as his only support. “‘I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands / and wrote my will across the sky in stars.’” He hiccups.

“That’s nice,” Niall says vaguely.

“That’s, like, everything,” Harry says. “Are you drunk?”

“Yes, and you’re drunk too,” Niall answers. “Remind me to roll down the window in the taxi in case I need to throw up.”

Harry sets about trying to wriggle his fingers through Niall’s again. “I’m going to get lost if you don’t hold on to me,” he says, like he’s a small child in a grocery store. Niall holds on anyway. “I like your little found family. You and the lads.”

“Me, too,” Niall sighs. Too much, and maybe that’s the problem. The thing about uni is that it’s all just temporary. You’d think it’d be easier to remember but it’s not, especially not in the thick of it. But really everyone is only there for a few years, and then you all move on. And everything’s different. “Oh,” he says, glancing down at his phone. “Harry. Hey. It’s Christmas.”

“I love Christmas,” Harry sighs. He breathes out, and his breath leaves him in a fan of condensation. It’s surprisingly beautiful through Niall’s drunken haze, and he tightens his grip on Harry’s hand. Survival buddies. “I built a snowman with my sister once and she knocked him over on me. I thought he’d attacked me.” Niall laughs.

Smiling, Harry goes on, “Another time, my mum made us hot chocolate before bed but I thought that maybe Santa would want some too, instead of milk, so I got up in the night to make him some. Found my mum, instead. That’s how I found out, you know. About him.”

“Sorry,” Niall says, because he remembers what that realization is like. Sad, and a little like some of the magic has gone out of the world.

Harry just says, “No. That was just the tide.”

A car honks, and Niall struggles to sit up to see. A cab driver leans out of his window and says, “Did you two call a taxi?”

“Here, c’mon,” Niall says, helping Harry up. “We’re going home.”

Harry stumbles into Niall when Niall pulls him up, and he tucks his head under Niall’s jaw and takes a deep sniff. “You smell good,” he says. He licks Niall’s throat, and it takes everything Niall has not to shove him away, it’s so weird and sensitive. “Taste different,” Harry observes. He leaves Niall standing winded just past the reach of the casino’s awning, and he fumbles to slide into the cab beside Harry when the taxi driver throws him an exasperated look. He only just remembers to tell the driver the address of the cabin.

Niall catches himself glancing at Harry in the backseat. The tops of buildings are lined with Christmas lights like the iced piping on a gingerbread house, and the crisp sharp light of a winter night makes Harry’s skin look warm and soft.

He can’t, like. Maybe it’s just because he’s drunk but, like, Harry’s not been that handsome before, right? Like, not so that Niall wants to grab his head and put his mouth back to Niall’s throat, ask him to bite this time.

Jesus. What the fuck.

But, like. He reaches out without really knowing what he’s doing and touches Harry’s fingers on the plastic seat between them, and Harry looks over with a lazy grin. He flips his hand over and seizes Niall’s fingers, and well, that’s all Niall needs to pull him that little bit closer and kiss him.

Harry takes a wild breath, his hands flailing before they settle in Niall’s hair, and tries to climb into his lap. Niall pushes him back down to the seat by his hips, although he doesn’t stop kissing him. It’s bad enough neither of them are buckled up. Harry kisses slow and sloppy, a bit of drool landing on Niall’s chin when Harry aims wrong and tries to French kiss the dimple there, and Niall just laughs and pulls Harry’s face back to his. He tastes like the cheap vodka they’d been drinking at the bar because they’d both spent all their money on dumbfuck spa treatments in the casino resort, and he keeps making these half-aborted tugs on Niall’s hair, like he wants to pull but he’s not sure he’s allowed.

The cab comes to a sudden halt, and the driver clears his throat gruffly. “The total’s $27.50, boys.” Niall fumbles for his wallet while Harry slowly asks, “Is that a lot?” in what he thinks must be a whisper.

Niall pays the driver and slides out of the cab, Harry stumbling out after straight into Niall’s back. The door isn’t even locked, probably because Niall and Louis are the ones with keys. Niall flips the bolt on their way in, and Harry spins them around and pins him up against the door.

“Do you speak Irish?” Harry asks.

“Is that your version of dirty talk?” Niall laughs.

Dopily, Harry touches Niall’s cheek. “Love it when you smile,” he says. “So much nicer than when you were angry with me. Love your nose, too, wow. Those eyes!”

“Jesus, let’s get you to bed.” Niall’s edging into that pre-hangover, post-drunken haze feeling that usually means he needs to crash now or deal with a blistering headache in the morning. Harry and Niall lean heavily on each other on the stairs up to the loft. “Okay, here you are,” Niall says, attempting to deposit Harry on the pallet he made himself on the loft floor. He tips over instead, Harry’s brave attempt to save him going tits up. He lands across Niall’s legs.

Harry runs his hands up the backs of Niall’s legs, from his calves to his thighs. Niall shivers. “Great legs,” Harry sighs, leaning in to press a kiss to the back of Niall’s knee. “Nice bum,” he adds, and kisses Niall’s arse. Literally. It’s so wildly funny that Niall starts laughing, and Harry rolls off of him, disgruntled.

“I’m being romantic,” he insists, leaning in to meet Niall’s mouth again.

“Don’t know where that mouth has been,” Niall says, making no attempt to push Harry away. He draws back the blankets on Harry’s bed instead and curls under, Harry following suit. It’s so much like their stupid survival cave that Niall pulls Harry close out of instinct, imagining that they’re dying of hypothermia. As if Harry’s his last will, Niall says, “Got to call my dad tomorrow. Say thank you.”

“Mm,” Harry hums, sliding his ice cold hands up the back of Niall’s shirt. Weird, that he’d almost been expecting it. Like it’s familiar. “Don’t throw up on me, please.”

Niall snorts, Harry’s face as close as if they’re still kissing. It’s a nice thought, that maybe they are. “Deal. Same.”

Harry just curls his fingers into Niall’s back like there’s any way of pulling him closer, and that’s how Niall falls asleep, Harry snoring familiarly in his ear.

***

Niall wakes up with a splitting headache, cottonmouth, and the taste of bile in his mouth. He also wakes up to the back of Harry’s head, his bare shoulders moving just a bit as he breathes slow and deep, fast asleep. Niall shakes his shoulder. “Harry. Did we hook up last night?”

Harry just mumbles in his sleep, steadfastly refusing to answer him, so Niall shakes him again. Harry groggily rolls over onto his back and lifts one heavy eyelid. “What?”

“Did we hook up?”

Harry thinks about it. “I’m not sure,” he answers slowly. “I think we might’ve kissed.” He leans over and presses his mouth to Niall’s, soft and sweet. “Yep.”

Niall struggles for something to say. “And – that’s it?” He’s not sure if he means that’s all they did, or that’s all Harry has to say about it, or what. It’s very early. He has a very bad hangover.

“Niall,” says Harry slowly. “Do you need me to be awake for this, or can I go back to sleep?”

“Yeah, sleep, whatever. Happy Christmas, by the way.”

Harry just murmurs, rolling over and going back to sleep. Niall slips out from under the blankets and rises to his feet, his back and knee aching like an old man’s. He hobbles down the stairs and relieves himself in the loo, and then he decides to go ask Perrie for some Advil for his headache. He pushes the door to hers and Zayn’s room open, and it’s empty.

“She left last night,” Zayn says, his head poking up the top of the couch. “She took the car, so Liam’s taking me home today.”

“You’re leaving early?” Niall asks, dropping his hand. “But – it’s Christmas.”

“Some Christmas it’s turned out to be,” Zayn snorts. “Don’t worry, Nialler. It’s not your fault.”

Niall doesn’t respond, not least because he doesn’t know how. Instead, he goes to get the coffee percolating, and then he rustles about the loo for an ancient bottle of pain relievers. There’s a fair chance they might be expired and kill him, but he’s too out of sorts to mind.

Someone knocks on the front door, so Niall turns unlocks the door and opens it to reveal Liam, his face pale with cold. He shoulders past Niall, halfway shoving him out of the way, and Niall steps back. “Where were you?” Liam asks, like he’s not the one who didn’t stay at the cabin last night.

“What do you mean? I was here,” Niall says.

“You were here?” Liam asks. “Because I drove back from the casino, and I knocked, but no one answered the door. I spent the night at the diner down the road. I thought – I thought something had happened to you.”

Feeling horribly guilty for being too busy snogging Harry and drinking till he passed out, Niall says, “No, sorry, I must’ve been asleep. I’m so sorry, Liam.”

“Louis’s not here, either?” Liam asks, breathing hard. He wipes at his runny nose. Zayn starts to answer and Liam holds up his hand. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m going to take you home but first I need to know that Louis’s alright.”

“Did something happen?” Niall asks, moving backward slowly until he’s perched on the back of the couch. “After you and Louis left?”

Liam shakes his head. He lets out a dour little laugh and drops his head till his chin’s resting on his chest. “I lied to him,” Liam admits. “For you,” he tells Zayn. “Why couldn’t you – why couldn’t you have just been honest?”

“Why couldn’t you?” Zayn parries quickly, and Niall starts worrying at the inside of his cheek.

Liam just throws up his hands. He goes into his and Louis’s room, and Niall hears their voices through the shut door just a few minutes later. They don’t sound too happy.

Some Christmas, he thinks.

Louis and Liam march out of their bedroom a terse fifteen minutes later, when Niall and Zayn are sat in stony silence at the breakfast table, sipping on steaming mugs of Niall’s terrible coffee. He always makes it too strong, like tar, because that’s the way his da takes it. Louis’s key rustles in the lock, and then he pushes the door open, his eyes red-rimmed and shadowed but otherwise okay.

“We’re going,” Liam tells Zayn shortly.

Zayn looks up at Louis, surprised.

“I want to get home,” Louis just says. “Fast as possible. Even if that means riding with you.”

“Tell Harry we said bye. If we don’t see him before we fly back, then we’ll see him back home,” Louis tells Niall.

Niall nods slowly. He doesn’t mention the fact that he and Harry will have to clean up the whole house or pack up all their leftover food and supplies. It doesn’t seem worth bothering with. Niall hugs each of them goodbye; Liam takes a deep breath against the side of his head, Louis squeezes his back like he’s trying to hurt him, and Zayn kisses his cheek when he pulls away.

And then the door shuts, and they’re gone. It’s very quiet in the cabin. Niall carries a cup of coffee up to the loft for Harry, who sits up slowly and cradles it between both palms. “The others left?” he checks. “Well,” Harry considers. “That does sound like Louis.”

Niall rolls his eyes. “They love each other so much, they can’t stand it. Idiots, the lot of them.”

“Yeah,” Harry agrees fondly. He starts to rub his face, and then he jerks his hand away. “Ow, Jesus. What – what happened to my nose?”

Niall laughs so hard that he tips over beside Harry. “Want to get lunch?” he asks him, looking up at Harry in soft winter sunlight, his eyes still puffy from sleep.

“Please,” Harry agrees. Niall helps him dump the blankets from his pallet bed on the couch, and then Harry shimmies into a pair of skinny jeans and a thick orange jumper. Niall puts on his favorite gray jumper, and then he pulls a cap down over his messy hair and ties a scarf around his neck, and they’re off.

Harry drives, because he likes it and because Niall figures Harry driving them into a snowbank is the least of their worries, really. The station is still set to static from the last time they’d ridden together, so Harry finds the Christmas station and they listen to Don Henley’s cover of “Please Come Home for Christmas.” After so long spent trapped inside by it, Niall doesn’t expect the snow glittering in broad sunlight to be so beautiful. The icicles dangling from tree branches cast prisms of light onto leaves and the ground, and Harry hums along under his breath, his arm pressed up against Niall’s on the center console.

They turn north, towards the nearest town, a dinky little place called Scranton with Christmas lights on most roofs or in most storefronts, the streets freshly cleared from snow. Harry pulls into a spot, and they settle down at a little diner with Formica tables and deep red vinyl booths. Harry orders pancakes, Niall a BLT, and they watch little kids sled up and down a mild hill in the little park across the street.

Harry and Niall go for a walk around the little town when they’re finished eating. The older parts of town, the business district, is enough like home that Niall ventures to ask about Harry’s family. “I’ll call mine if you call yours,” he says, so they take out their phones and dial at the same time. Harry’s mum picks up just before Niall’s dad, so that Niall can feel Harry’s excited tug on Niall’s sleeve. Then his dad’s rumbling voice, “Hi, son.”

“Hey, Bob,” Niall smiles.

He can hear the answering smile on Bobby’s voice when he asks, “Well, about ready to come home, then?”

Niall heaves a sigh. “Yeah, I think so.” He watches Harry out of the corner of his eye. Harry loops his arm through Niall’s, and Niall asks his dad, “How’s Greg and Denise, and the little guy?”

Bobby passes the phone to Denise to answer, and she fills him in on all of Theo’s latest adventures. He pulled a cat by the tail a couple of days ago and the cat scratched him up pretty good, so this year’s Christmas pictures feature Niall’s middle-aged dad, his son and his son’s wife, and a toddler looking like he survived an attack from Wolverine.

“We miss you here,” Denise says. “Can’t wait for you to get back.”

“Miss you too,” Niall says, and realizes it’s true. He even misses squabbling with Greg over the right way to slice a turkey, and his dad snoring from the recliner as soon as dinner’s over. Denise promises to send Niall plenty of pictures of Theo opening his Christmas presents, and then she rings off, with one final, “Love you, miss you.”

Harry’s already finished with his phone call when Niall pockets his phone, and then Harry just slips his hand into Niall’s. Or maybe Niall was waiting to catch him, he can’t really tell. “What do you say,” Harry starts, “that we just pretend everything is fine with our friends, and we decide to enjoy our Christmas?”

“We’ll deal with it tomorrow,” Niall agrees. So they grab cups of hot chocolate from another diner, and when Niall tells Harry about how he and his dad used to take a little boat out on the water on brittle winter mornings when his dad got off work, he insists on walking to Nay Aug Park.

‘Course, there aren’t any boats going, so they take the long walkway threading through the treetops to a treehouse suspended between a couple of trees. They huddle together and watch the Christmas lights go up in the houses around the park, and it’s. Well, if it was a date, it’d be a good one. Niall thinks he can ever hear Christmas carolers going door to door, Harry humming along again under his breath, his cheek on Niall’s shoulder.

Niall nudges him gently. “Survival buddy.”

Harry picks his head up. “What?”

Niall’s not sure how to say it, and anyway, Harry’s eyes flicker from Niall’s eyes to his mouth. He’s not sure who leans in first, and then they’re kissing. Harry’s fingers curl around the back of Niall’s neck so that his skin erupts in goosebumps all over, and he tastes sweetly of maple syrup and hot chocolate. Harry pulls away with one last soft, close-lipped kiss to Niall’s lips, his eyes half-lidded and dark.

“Niall,” he starts.

“I think there’s an entire house that no one else is using,” Niall agrees.

Harry pulls them up to that same spot on the driveway as when they first arrived, and then he unclicks his seatbelt and climbs into Niall’s lap, his knees on either side of Niall’s hips. “A whole house and you want to do it here?” Niall asks. He adjusts the seat back so that he can lay back a bit more, tipping his head up into Harry’s kiss.

It’s a long fifteen minutes before they manage to get the car door open, cold wind rustling around the interior of the car so that Harry’s bouncing eagerly from foot to foot while Niall unlocks the house.

“What are the odds the beds are safe to use?” Harry asks, when he’s got his hands under the waistband of Niall’s jeans and Niall’s working on unbuttoning his shirt with his teeth. They consider it. Knowing Louis and Liam and Zayn and Perrie, well… “Here,” Harry says, dragging the tangle of blankets off the couch. He drops them onto the floor right in front of the fireplace, just like they’d done when the heating had gone out, and even though it’s kind of silly Niall’s heart gives a weird clutch. He stretches out on the pallet bed.

Harry follows suit just behind. He throws his leg over Niall’s hip and pushes himself up so that he’s sat astride his hips, his hands already going for Niall’s zipper. “Wait, wait,” Niall says. “C’mere.” He grabs Harry’s hands and pushes them up under the hem of his jumper himself, because Harry’s hands are freezing.

Harry digs his fingers into Niall’s ribs to make him laugh, and then he leans in for another kiss, his mouth as red as Christmas. Harry pulls Niall’s jumper off when his hands are nice and warm, and then he tugs his own off over his head, as well. He moves away just long enough for both of them to shuck their jeans, and then he’s kissing down Niall’s shoulder and back.

“Smell like honey,” Harry mutters, and Niall means to tell him it’s because of the massage he’d got. Then Harry starts mouthing at the bottom of Niall’s spine, his fingers digging into Niall’s hips, and he can hardly concentrate enough to form words, much less talk. He rolls onto his back, and Harry’s poised over him, his pupils big and dark. His skin looks so warm and rich in the firelight, Niall’s half-expecting him not to feel quite real when he slides his hands up Harry’s arm, curling his fingers over the top of his shoulder. Then Harry smiles, his face breaking up in deep laughter lines, and Niall huffs out a laugh.

Harry’s hand slips down between them, and his fingers are warm around Niall’s dick when he tugs him off. He’s surprised to find himself sweating by the time he’s finished, his back arching off the blankets. “We should’ve tried this sooner,” Harry murmurs into Niall’s eyebrow. His lanky body is draped over Niall’s, and Niall means to suck him off just as soon as he can muster up the energy. “So hot.”

“Next time, we’ll know,” Niall says, not really thinking about what he’s saying. Then Harry pretends to squish Niall’s head between his thighs when he wriggles his way down Harry’s body, and Niall pinches the sensitive inside of Harry’s thigh, and Harry actually does almost knee him in his head.

When they’ve settled down, Harry winds his fingers through Niall’s hair and pulls hard when Niall starts sucking, and he strokes his fingers soothingly along Niall’s scalp when he’s done coming down Niall’s throat.  

Niall’s phone rings later, when he’s mostly asleep with his head on Harry’s chest, the flames in the fireplace flickering on the backs of his eyelids. He scrabbles for his jeans and pulls his phone out, checking the ID, and he mouths _Louis_ to Harry, who nods and folds his arms beneath his head. Niall sits up, answering with a “Hello?”

“Hey, lad, it’s just me,” Louis says, as if their phones don’t all have caller ID. It’s just one of those Louis things; Niall’s done trying to figure it out. “We got back a few hours ago, I just wanted to let you know.”

“Thank you,” Niall lets out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “And, hey. About – you know. I’m sorry.”

Louis snorts. It still sounds soft. “Not your fault, buddy.”

“Did you and Liam sort your stuff out?” Niall asks. He bites his lip. “It wasn’t his fault either, you know.”

“He asked me to move in with him,” Louis says slowly. “I wasn’t going to say yes unless you were – unless you said yes.”

“Yes,” Niall says immediately. “Yeah, of course, Lou.”

“Well.” Louis sounds deeply pleased. “You’ll still come cook for me, and clean up our flat, right?”

Niall rolls his eyes and laughs. Right now, yeah, he would. “Happy Christmas. See you at home, right?”

“Back on our own campus in our own country, I can’t wait for real beer,” Louis sighs. “Give Harry my love.”

“Will do,” Niall says, glancing over his shoulder at him. Harry has his arm folded under his head, and he’s unabashedly watching Niall. “Not your fault either,” Niall adds impulsively, before he can reason himself out of it. “Zayn, and everything. I guess he’s just…”

Quickly, Louis says, “True blue, yeah? That’s me and you. Right?”

“Right,” Niall agrees softly. And Liam, and maybe Harry, as well. But it’s too late now to sort out their individual relationships. True blue is as good a way of saying it as any.

“Good lad,” Louis says, and Niall can hear the smile in his voice. “See you at New Year’s.”

“Louis gives you his love,” Niall says, tossing his phone aside. He lays back down and Harry rolls until his cheek is pressed just above Niall’s heart. “He also said you’re a dick.”

Harry snorts. “He did not.”

“No, but he was thinking it,” Niall says, and Harry laughs so hard he falls off Niall.

Harry keeps the heat turned up too high on the ride back to UPenn, so Niall cracks his window just enough to ruffle his hair. Harry drops Niall off at his dorm, and Niall goes inside and starts to pack his things. He finds the dumb nightlight he’d bought on a whim at the Qwik Mart in the middle of nowhere, and he tosses it into his suitcase after a moment of consideration.

He flies back to England two days later, and four days after that, he runs into Harry at a coffees shop just off campus. “Fancy meeting you here,” Harry smiles slowly. He has his hair tied back in a neat bun, and Niall walks over to him, smiling himself. “I didn’t know you wore glasses,” Harry says.

Niall pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t know you came here.” It’s Perrie’s favorite café; he was here with here just the other day, same as he’s been here tons of times before. It’s strange to think Harry might’ve been here as well, and he didn’t know him.

Harry nudges his cup with the nub of his pen. “Green tea,” he explains. He lifts a book in his lap, a dog-eared copy of _Call of the Wild._

“I have something for you,” Niall says, before he forgets. He shrugs his backpack off one shoulder and digs around inside until he comes up with the dinky nightlight with the pattern of constellations on. He’s tried the other one out in his and Liam’s flat when he got home, and the light only kind of vaguely looks star-shaped on the walls. Still, he didn’t buy it for nothing. “In honor of, you know, our ice cave. Would’ve been nice to have one of these, you know?”

“You’ve been carrying this around with you?” Harry smiles, even the bridge of his nose wrinkling with it.

Niall just shrugs. “Are you going to Louis’s New Year’s party later?”

“Was thinking about it,” Harry admits, tapping his pen gently against the tabletop. “You?”

“I’m heading over there now, once I’ve got some coffee,” Niall nods his head toward the barista. “He’s making me help decorate.”

“Well, you are very good at that. ‘Course, I’m better.”

“Yeah? Wanna come?”

Harry’s already packing his book back into his own backpack and pulling his coat and gloves on. “Sure I will,” Harry says. “I don’t know how you’d survive without me.”

Niall picks up his order for a peppermint mocha, and he and Harry step out onto the blustery street, Harry’s flyaway curls blowing around his face. “D’you know,” he starts, linking arms with Niall, “I think my nose hair is starting to grow back,” and Niall laughs.


End file.
